It is widely accepted that many companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc have vast amounts of data on our friends, interests, and spending habits amongst other things. At times, for example for data mining or scientific collaboration, it can be useful for companies to access internal and external data. However, they are rightfully blocked by Privacy laws.

Hence, there is an increasing work in thinking of ways to properly anonymise data to enable mining. Aggregation of data to wash PII (personally identifiable information) is one way to achieve this, but can lose important granularity and detail.

Raffael Strassnig, VP Data Scientist at Barclays retail bank, spoke at a summit last month to stress the importance of protecting privacy. Anonymising data at scale is a very hard problem but Strassnig’s team have implemented an algorithm by a PhD candidate and modified it to work on Barclay’s Big Data. The method involves:

“clustering the data into k-means clusters, with no cluster overlapping, the clusters being a certain size to comply with k-anonymity constraint, and minimising the loss of data when applying the procedure to the dataset by using a dissimilarity measure”

Future developments in application of Machine Learning techniques may enable use of PII without anonymisation. Until then, the Data Science team at Barclays is leading the way in protecting their users’ data while processing it.

‘The real danger is that it can all happen at speeds to which humans can’t react. Firms go bankrupt or markets get shattered before anyone’s really realised what’s going on, which is why it’s really important to have the right safeguards in place.’

He envisions OpenAI as the modern incarnation of Xerox PARC, the tech research lab that thrived in the 1970s. Just as PARC’s largely open and unfettered research gave rise to everything from the graphical user interface to the laser printer to object-oriented programing, Brockman and crew seek to delve even deeper into what we once considered science fiction. PARC was owned by, yes, Xerox, but it fed so many other companies, most notably Apple, because people like Steve Jobs were privy to its research. At OpenAI, Brockman wants to make everyone privy to its research.

But along with such promise comes deep anxiety. Musk and Altman worry that if people can build AI that can do great things, then they can build AI that can do awful things, too. They’re not alone in their fear of robot overlords, but perhaps counterintuitively, Musk and Altman also think that the best way to battle malicious AI is not to restrict access to artificial intelligence but expand it. That’s part of what has attracted a team of young, hyper-intelligent idealists to their new project.

Giving up control is the essence of the open source ideal. If enough people apply themselves to a collective goal, the end result will trounce anything you concoct in secret. But if AI becomes as powerful as promised, the equation changes. We’ll have to ensure that new AIs adhere to the same egalitarian ideals that led to their creation in the first place. Musk, Altman, and Brockman are placing their faith in the wisdom of the crowd. But if they’re right, one day that crowd won’t be entirely human.